Abstract:
Cardiovascular diseases, mainly caused by stenosis
or aneurysms of arteries, are the leading reasons of death
worldwide. Angiography, which is not only invasive but also
risky, painful and costly, is the common method for the
recognition of such diseases. However presently non-invasive
and radiation free cardiac MRI is being used to evaluate the
function and anatomy of the heart chambers, heart valves and
blood flow through major vessels. The morphology, formation
and plaque buildup conditions of blood vessels indicates
diseases such as heart attack, stroke, angina, arrhythmias,
heart failure etc. Thus, the vessels needs to be identified
properly and clearly. In this paper, cardiac MRI is used for
accurate extraction and enhancement of blood vessel,
emphasizing upon the minor and somewhat discontinuous
vessels. MRI technique in this field was less explored and is
very challenging because of poor contrast difference between
the vessels and organs and mentionable amount of noise. The
detection process uses both morphological operators and image
gradient characteristics. The result obtained by using
morphological operators has better effectiveness in terms of
noise reduction and accuracy.
